Graham Kendrick: The Global March For Jesus

On 17th May thousands of Christians young and old took part in Global March For Jesus' Operation A to Z and prayer walked around their neighbourhoods. It was the latest in a long line of initiatives linked to Britain's praise and worship maestro GRAHAM KENDRICK. Ian Boughton met the worship.

Graham Kendrick

Your vision may not be all it seems to be", says Graham Kendrick. By the
time 'God has knocked you about a bit', your musical direction might
be completely different from what you expected... and that means your
music may end up doing a very precise job that you didn't see from the
beginning.

"By the time the Marches for Jesus had got up to 55,000 people, in the
second year, it was clear that the whole thing had begun to run away a
bit, and now it's global... but I still doubt if we'll get a
millennium grant for one!"

Graham Kendrick,
looking weary after a day of meetings at Holy Trinity Brompton, sinks
into a chair, yawns, and grins broadly at the idea of a devoted walker
for Jesus being unwilling to make it across the room to the coffee
jar.

The most successful contemporary hymn writer is surprisingly slight of
stature, watchful but affable, logical in reasoning and ready to laugh
even about himself... but there is a very clear sign of something
strong inside. You don't get vast numbers of the human race walking
for Jesus without some kind of determination, and it's clear that in
any intellectual argument, this is a guy you'd want on your side.

After all, Jesus might have said in '90s language, disciples aren't
wimps. So, what is the job to be done by a strong songwriting disciple
in the '90s?

"I can sum it up in a kind of mission statement - it's 'worship in
every place, prayer for all people'. That, I believe, is God's
intention for the world; I believe every Christian, worship leader or
not, is caught up in God's mega-purpose to fill the world with
worship.

"This actually resonates with me! And when it comes to walks, this
means in shopping centres, in housing estates, in Istanbul... and
locally."

It is the local walk that makes up the intriguing development of the
March For Jesus initiative. Prayer walking is an intriguing concept.
The general idea is that instead of moving blindly from one place to
another, you spend your walking looking at what the world is actually
doing around you. As you observe more closely, you see things, people
and even areas to be prayed for, and pray for them as you walk.

The development in recent years has been to do it in groups; some
groups even devise route plans to cover entire towns with prayer over
a given period.

Graham is co-author of a book on it, which mixes fascinating stories
of prayer walking around the world with some neatly-phrased
understanding for those who wonder if they can do it: 'while
understanding that spiritual powers are real,' says the writer at one
point, 'some readers may feel they have enough stress in the course of
daily living, without picking street fights with demons...'!

Graham Kendrick
laughs, and quite spontaneously glances seriously at his feet. "The
whole idea of prayer walking sprang up alongside the better known
March For Jesus concept, and started with that crazy idea of walking
from John O'Groats to Land's End, and the next year doing
west-to-east, to get the shape of the cross... and it really set a
ball rolling."

Fine. But what does marching and prayer walking do for a cause, apart
from getting you a lot of healthy exercise and a few blisters? And
what's it got to do with Christian songwriting? "What does it achieve?
For myself, having been involved in the new wave of praise and worship
in the '70s and '80s, it was an answer to a question that I had to ask
myself: "even if we were having a great time in our churches, how was
anything we were doing having any impact on the outside world? It was
all confined within walls..." so we took the walls off the church!"

The same as on his latest album title, 'No More Walls'? "Right, it's
the same walls, and we're still taking them off. Back then, the idea
seemed crazy... I mean, there was no apparent demand for anyone to
take this kind of thing on to the streets, but it was a conviction I
couldn't get away from.

"I felt constrained to create a framework of songs... a script, if you
like, for the streets. We did an instruction booklet on it and sold it
for a pound - I was astonished by the take-up, and all of a sudden, it
looked like people were actually going to do it! I was really worried
- I thought people are really going to do this, and it's not tried. If
you'll excuse the pun, the idea wasn't road tested at all. I was
saying with apparent confidence to churches, 'why don't you do this,
it'll be great!', while not knowing whether the whole thing was going
to fall apart; it was.... an interesting situation!"